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This study explores the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) within family businesses. It seeks to understand how family-owned enterprises navigate the adoption of AI technologies amidst balancing traditional business values and the imperatives of digital transformation. The research addresses the gap in the existing literature by providing insights into the strategic, operational and cultural dynamics influencing AI adoption in family businesses, highlighting the unique challenges and opportunities they face in leveraging AI for competitive advantage while preserving their legacy.

Employing a qualitative research design, this study utilizes semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders in Turkish family businesses actively engaging in AI projects. Purposive sampling was adopted to ensure a diverse representation of industries and AI adoption stages. The interviews aimed to capture in-depth insights into the motivations, strategies and outcomes of AI integration within these enterprises. Thematic analysis was conducted on the interview transcripts to identify recurring themes and patterns, providing a nuanced understanding of the factors driving AI adoption decisions in the context of family business values and traditions.

The findings reveal that family businesses in Turkey perceive AI as a strategic tool to enhance operational efficiency and customer engagement. However, integrating AI technologies is often met with challenges, including resource constraints, digital literacy gaps and concerns over maintaining family legacy. Notably, businesses that successfully navigate AI adoption tend to employ tailored strategies that align with their core values, involving key family members in the decision-making process and fostering a culture of innovation. The study also highlights the importance of ethical considerations and governance in ensuring AI initiatives resonate with the family business ethos.

The study’s reliance on qualitative interviews within a single country context limits the generalizability of the findings. Future research could expand the geographical scope and incorporate quantitative methods to validate the identified themes across broader populations. Additionally, exploring the impact of generational differences within family businesses on AI adoption could offer more profound insights. The study underscores the need for a more nuanced understanding of the interplay between technology and tradition in family businesses, suggesting avenues for further investigation into how these enterprises can leverage AI to foster innovation while preserving their legacy.

This research offers practical guidance for family businesses contemplating AI integration. It emphasizes the importance of aligning AI strategies with family values and involving stakeholders across generations in the adoption process. The findings suggest that family businesses can benefit from investing in digital literacy and fostering a culture open to technological innovation. Additionally, the study highlights the need for robust governance structures to navigate ethical considerations in AI adoption. By adopting a strategic approach to AI integration, family businesses can enhance their competitiveness without compromising their core values, ensuring long-term sustainability and success in the digital era.

Integrating AI in family businesses has significant social implications, particularly regarding employment and preserving the family legacy. The study suggests that thoughtful AI adoption can contribute to job creation and skill development, counteracting concerns over job displacement. Moreover, by leveraging AI to align with their core values, family businesses can reinforce their role as stewards of social and economic stability within their communities. This research underscores the potential of AI to support the intergenerational transfer of knowledge and values, fostering innovation while preserving the unique cultural heritage of family enterprises.

This study contributes to the emerging literature on AI adoption in family businesses by exploring the Turkish context. It fills a gap in the literature by examining the unique challenges and opportunities family businesses face in integrating AI, highlighting the interplay between technological innovation and traditional values. The research offers valuable insights into tailored strategies for successful AI adoption that respect the legacy and ethos of family enterprises. By focusing on the socio-cultural dimensions of technology integration, this study enriches our understanding of how family businesses can navigate digital transformation while preserving their identity.

This paper aims to review the immigrant entrepreneurship literature to locate how researchers consider embeddedness to home and host countries beyond the “embedded” or “not” dichotomy.

The paper conducts a systematic literature review. The authors found 106 articles in the Scopus and Web of Science databases, using a structured search and selection protocol.

Few articles perceive embeddedness openly as a gradual phenomenon. However, articles in the review use different approaches for considering relative levels of embeddedness, such as depth of social ties. In addition, some articles take a dual perspective or make multi-contextual comparisons to acknowledge immigrant entrepreneurs’ embeddedness levels. These articles emphasise embeddedness as a gradual phenomenon to understand the complexity of immigrant entrepreneurs’ contextualisation better. Based on the review, the paper develops a model, considering embeddedness as an emergent result of the immigrants’ engagement with spaces, networks, markets and institutions of a given home or host context. It also accounts for the dynamic interaction between contextual factors as embeddedness levels change.

The paper has located all relevant papers in the used databases. However, the systematic review protocol naturally limits its scope. Nevertheless, the developed model based on the review helps researchers develop a more comprehensive understanding of embeddedness and possibly ask novel questions.

This paper can help policymakers improve their policies for the progressive social integration of immigrants, as it helps consider different embeddedness levels.

Researchers mainly consider individuals’ embeddedness as either “embedded” or “not.” However, we can also understand embeddedness at various levels, e.g. partial, increasing/decreasing and gradual. Significant changes occur in the embeddedness of individuals during immigration. Additionally, contextual relations intertwine immigrants’ entrepreneurial activity over time. The paper reviews embeddedness in the immigrant entrepreneurship literature, searching beyond the dichotomic use of embeddedness. Then, it develops a theoretical understanding of embeddedness levels.

Purpose of this paper is to explore how resistance of individual and collective actors play role in maintenance and change of institutions. Framing tactics of two emerging social movements in Istanbul Technical University and Middle East Technical University, which emerged against institutional changes in Turkish higher education, were examined by hybrid ethnography, using both online and offline data sources. Findings show that framing tactics of institutional entrepreneurs comprise different discourses and different forms of power, which also vary during different life stages of these movements. This paper contributes to existing literature in three ways. First power dynamics in institutional change, which is mostly disregarded in institutional theory, is taken into consideration. Second, with a longitudinal comparative study, it is shown that outcomes of social movements with similar demands may diverge according to different framing tactics based on power mechanisms that appealed at different stages of their life cycle. Third, this paper, as one of the few examples of a hybrid ethnographic approach, underlines the key role of considering both offline–online data sources, as an important part of actors’ life that take place in the online world.

The author join Orlikowski (2007) in seeking the “reconfiguration of our conventional assumptions and considerations of materiality.” In her sociomaterial approach, Orlikowski combines what is social and what is material into a “sociomaterial assemblage” in considering material and social aspects of technology. However, the author thinks this conflation creates a number of analytical and phenomenological problems for the understanding of technology in organizing. Rather than considering materiality with a primacy, the author argue that the proposed approach may reduce what is material into a social essence and makes materiality of a technology impossible to perceive separate from the social aspects. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Empirical examples of “Information Search” and “Mobile Communication” in Orlikowski (2007) are further employed to discuss the grounds of the criticism.

The author propose a critical realist perspective to technology both as social and material recursively.

The analysis is primarily ontological and meta-theoretical. In future, extensive reviews can be performed on what questions have been asked and what questions have been omitted by researchers employing different versions of sociomaterial perspective.

The perspective offered by this paper enables asking new questions and necessary empirical leverage to analyze how one technology becomes materialized and successful in the social realm and not the other. The author also discusses strategic conditions of how one successful technology can be replaced by another.

Understanding the state of the art in theory in understanding material and social aspects of technology would help us develop novel strategies to contest, complement and adapt to material and social issues of technologies.

This paper is among the few critical papers that meta-theoretically question the relatively recent sociomaterial turn in organization studies and information systems fields.

The purpose of this paper is to systematically review online ethnography and its boundary challenges. The paper especially focusses on how researchers draw space boundaries, set time boundaries and engage their online field.

The authors perform a systematic review of extant literature and identify 59 papers in 40 different journals as online ethnographies from various management disciplines. The authors perform both qualitative and quantitative analyses on papers in the sample.

The paper identifies how online ethnographers both define boundaries and engage their online field. The paper shows that some of the advantages of online ethnography actually prompt researchers to favor-specific research designs over others.

The authors only focussed on articles adopting online ethnography in organization and management studies that are listed in Social Sciences Citation Index database. Online ethnographies in other research fields and indexes are not studied in this paper.

The paper makes suggestions on how to complement existing online ethnographies to reach a more comprehensive practice of online ethnography.

The systematic review may help researchers to locate useful online ethnography examples across various management disciplines and may contribute to the maturation of online ethnography.

The paper synthesizes emerging trends in online ethnography and identifies how specific advantages actually prompt online ethnographers to limit themselves in their research designs.

The purpose of this paper is to outline the context and the content of the six papers that follow in this special issue on “New Forms of Organizational Ethnography”.

This editorial explains the burgeoning interest in organizational ethnography over the last decade in terms of several favourable conditions that have supported this resurgence. It also offers a general view of the nature and diversity of new forms of organizational ethnography in studies of management and organization.

New forms of organizational ethnography have emerged in response to rapidly changing organizational environments and technological advances as well as the paradigmatic transformation of ethnography and ascendency of discursive and practice-based studies.

The editorial highlights an “ethnographic turn” in management and organization studies that is characterized by a renewal of the discipline through the proliferation of new forms of organizational ethnography. A focus on new organizational phenomena, methodological innovation and novel ways of organizing fieldwork constitute the three main pillars of new forms of organizational ethnography. It encourages researchers to develop forums and platforms designed to exploit these novel forms of organizational ethnography.

Situated atop the Dammam geological dome in the Eastern Province of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the University of Petroleum and Minerals commands a view, both visually and strategically, over what is probably the most economically dynamic area of the world. It lies within a 500‐mile stretch that encompassed a quarter of the earth's known petroleum reserves.